Does Your Company Need a Digital Facelift?

Share This Article:

By Penelope Brown, Director - Marketing and Communications at AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology (owner of the International Manufacturing Technology Show).

If you Google your company’s name, what will you find? Do you know? When is the last time you checked? What if you were to search for your company’s product? Would your company’s name show up on the first page?

Gone are the days when anyone in any business or industry can dismiss digital marketing and digital commerce as merely a passing fad. As we come close to entering a new year, it’s a good time to take a hard look at the face you’re showing to the world – that is, your company’s face on the internet.

Start with your website. Do you update it often? How does it look and feel? Are you using analytics to assess your web traffic? Your website should act as the main hub for all of your digital marketing activity. These days you can get a wealth of data and information about who’s coming to your website, how long they stick around, and what they’re doing while they visit. This is valuable data that you can leverage to find the “fall-off points” on your website and also improve the online experience for your customers.

With that website, it’s also important to think about search engine optimization (SEO), which is the methodology behind driving traffic to your website and appearing among the highest rankings in various online search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. This is especially important if a potential customer does a search for your primary product. If you aren’t on the first page of those search results, keep in mind that less than 10 percent of users will keep going on to page 2!

Social media has become another must-do. Listen to the naysayers all you want, but social media isn’t going anywhere. A study conducted by Harris Poll on behalf of Hootsuite found that Facebook accounts for one in every six minutes spent online and one in every five minutes spent on mobile. That’s among 1.09 billion active daily users. One in every three professionals in the world is on LinkedIn, including 40 million students and recent college graduates and also 49 percent of key decision makers. Deloitte found that “leading millennials” (age 26-31) consume 43% of the video they watch online vs. on a TV.

Don’t forget about customer service, either. The Hootsuite study found that 59 percent of Americans who use social media agree that it makes customer questions and complaints easier to get resolved.

AMT is using social media more and more to reach our members and other audiences like other manufacturing groups, the media, prospective members, and government officials and entities. We’ve seen an uptick in our website traffic and have developed partnerships and relationships that were formed digitally, sometimes becoming face-to-face collaborations. This is where business is getting done – more and more each day.

Manufacturing has been an industry slower to adopt digital technologies, for a variety of reasons. But as a younger customer emerges and becomes more prominent, your buyers will be looking for (and expecting) your digital presence. What will they find? Make it a resolution to take an honest look at your company’s digital presence, not just once but all year long.